An inexpensive printer is not always cheap to run
A printer has two prices. There is what you pay for the machine, and there is what you pay to run it, and the second one is the one most offices never work out. An inexpensive desktop laser can be exactly the right machine for one business and the wrong one for another, and the difference is almost always volume.
Why a small machine uses small cartridges
HP is the largest printer manufacturer in the world by a wide margin, and that does not happen by accident. A machine like the HP LaserJet Pro 4001dn is well built, quick, quiet and reliable, and it lists at $399.99. For what it is, that is a lot of printer for the money.
What makes it inexpensive is also what defines the job it is built for. It is a compact machine designed around a compact cartridge. Small cartridges hold less toner and therefore cost more per page than the large ones a floor standing machine uses. That is true across every brand, and it is a straightforward piece of engineering rather than a catch. It is also the reason a good printer can sit on a desk for four hundred dollars instead of four thousand.
So the useful question is never whether a machine is cheap. It is whether the machine matches the work you are going to give it.
The one number that tells the truth
Take the cartridge price and divide it by the pages that cartridge is rated for. That is your cost per page, and it is the only number that lets you compare one machine fairly against another.
Here is what that looks like with real figures. The 4001dn takes an HP 148X high yield black cartridge, which lists at $372.99 and is rated for 9,500 pages. That works out at about four cents a page. On the colour side, an HP Color LaserJet Pro 4201dw lists at $709.99 and takes the HP 210X set, which lists at $1,334.96 for all four cartridges. A page that uses all four works out at about twenty three cents. Those are HP list prices as of August 2026, and promotions move them around.
Neither of those numbers is good or bad on its own. Four cents a page is perfectly reasonable at three hundred pages a month and expensive at three thousand. The number only means something once you put your own volume beside it.
Two honest cautions about the arithmetic. The rated yield assumes five percent coverage of the page, which is roughly a business letter with no graphics. If you print forms with heavy rules, logos or photographs, your real yield will be lower than the box says. And the cartridge is not the only running cost, because drums, fusers and transfer units wear out too.
The part of the arithmetic nobody says out loud
Take that first caution seriously, because it is worth real money. Rated yields assume five percent coverage of the page. Most offices actually run somewhere between six and seven percent, because real pages carry logos, form lines, signatures and the odd photograph. That is a twenty to forty percent lift on the cost you just calculated. So the four cents a page on the 4001dn is the best case. In an ordinary office it lands closer to five cents, and sometimes past it.
Now complete the comparison properly, print only against print only. The direct comparable is the Kyocera ECOSYS PA5500x, and on our cost per page agreement it runs about 1.2 cents a page, with toner and service included in the rate. And here is the part that matters: the rate is the rate. If your pages run heavy, that is our cost to carry, not yours. The coverage risk moves from your side of the table to ours.
The PA5500x is the print only version of the ECOSYS MA5500ifx, the multifunction we place most often, and that engine has earned its reputation with us the hard way. We have MA5500s sitting in volume locations doing ten thousand pages a month. At that volume we would recommend splitting the work across two machines, but it can carry it.
So the honest gap between the two is about three cents a page, and often closer to four. It isn’t to say three cents sounds like money. It is simply that volume turns it into money. An office printing three thousand pages a month is looking at close to a hundred dollars a month, every month, before counting the drums and fusers the desktop machine will also ask for. Over a five year life that is a used car.
That is the so what. A cheap machine with an expensive page is a fine tool for three hundred pages a month and a slow leak at three thousand. Do you actually know your monthly page count? It is sitting on the machine’s meter right now, and if you would rather we ran this arithmetic on your real numbers, the assessment costs nothing.
Matching the machine to the job
Low volume, high quality. If you print a few hundred pages a month and you need them to look right, a desktop laser of this class is genuinely the correct buy. Sharp output, a small footprint, a low purchase price, and running costs that never grow large enough to be worth managing. If that is your office, buy the inexpensive machine and do not let anyone talk you out of it.
Occasional colour. If colour is for the odd proposal, certificate or client letter, a desktop colour laser is the sensible answer. What you are buying is the capability being there on the day you need it. At that kind of volume the per page cost is not the number that should decide anything.
High volume. This is where the machine needs to change, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the printer. A desktop machine is engineered for a certain amount of work. Past roughly a thousand pages a month, and sooner on colour, you are asking it to do a job it was not designed for. You feel that twice, once in supplies and once in the machine wearing out ahead of schedule.
At that point a business machine on a managed print agreement is the cheaper answer, because it uses large cartridges and bills by the page, and the page rate on one of those is a fraction of a desktop cartridge rate. It is not a better printer. It is a printer built for a different job.
A word on supplies
We supply genuine manufacturer cartridges. That is a considered choice rather than a rule we impose on anyone, and there are two practical reasons for it, both to do with money rather than loyalty.
The first is cover. On a machine still under manufacturer warranty, damage caused by a third party cartridge is generally not covered. On a machine under a service agreement with us, what is covered depends on what the agreement says, so it is worth reading that section before you change supplies rather than after.
The second is time. When a machine is running cartridges we did not supply, working out whether a fault sits with the cartridge or the printer takes longer, and that time is chargeable. On a machine your business depends on, that delay tends to cost more than the saving.
None of that is an argument that one cartridge is honest and another is not. It is simply where the risk sits, and it is worth knowing before you decide.
What I would actually do
Work out your pages per month before you buy anything. Your current printer will tell you if you print a configuration page, and if you have several machines it is worth adding them together, because the total is a surprise.
Then do the division. Cartridge price over rated yield, for every machine you are comparing. If you would rather start at the beginning, our guide on how to choose a printer or copier covers the rest of it.
If that sounds like work, it is the part we do at no charge, and we do it across four brands rather than one, which is the whole reason we sell four.
Where we fit
I would rather say this plainly than have it come out later. We are not the cheapest supplier of toner in Canada and we are not trying to be. What we sell is a machine that keeps running, supplies that turn up before you notice you needed them, and someone local who answers the phone. That costs a little more per cartridge, and for the businesses we look after it is worth it, because downtime costs them more than the difference.
Our job is to put the right machine in front of you at the right time, and sometimes the right machine is the four hundred dollar one you were already looking at.
If you want to know what your printing actually costs you, send me the make and model of what you are running and roughly what you print in a month. I am glad to work that out for you, and there is no charge and no obligation attached to it.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Adam Smith
Uptown Business Machines Incorporated
778-291-2849
UBMCanada.com
